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There are plenty of ways of making money, including asking your users to pay. Take a look at the number of 'personal cloud' crowdwfunding campaigns to see how m

by amirmc 12y ago

There are plenty of ways of making money, including asking your users to pay. Take a look at the number of 'personal cloud' crowdwfunding campaigns to see how much latent demand there is for things like this. Most of those products don't even exist yet. I think it's a mistake to assume that nobody will pay for such services given the vast number of people online now. It's just a matter of appropriate market segmentation [1]. Business models emerge as people begin to use things, and we should remember that Google didn't have one for a long time (neither did Facebook). [1] The teenage version of me didn't give a damn and only used free things but the adult version of me has a much better understanding of the trade-offs I'm making (and I also have disposable income now). I don't wish to become a sysadmin, which means I have very few options.

bsbechtel 12y ago
All good points. I think it's certainly feasible in the future, but not today. There are challenges besides technical and business that need to be solved too. For instance, you have a personal cloud server you set up that runs all your apps, and you have an Instagram-like app for your photos. How do others get to view your photos? There needs to be an aggregator that runs across servers to pull all the content and puts it into a newsfeed, with an easy to access URL/app for your friends to open and view your photos. How do we get this? With a centralized server?
- amirmc 12y ago
  Isn't that just a technical challenge? In this world view, you are your own central server and everyone else is their own. Let's take your example and run with it (bear in mind I'm ignoring some rough edges here). You share your instagram-style pics into an app on your personal server to begin with and then from there they get federated out to people who've decided to 'follow' you (or those you have allowed to). Practically speaking, the pic (or rather access to it) is given to the app on the personal servers of those followers. Their server then constructs a newsfeed of all the incoming pics and presents it to their user (via an app or web-interface or whatever). This doesn't happen on the mobile device itself but on the 'personal cloud' of the user. There are many things I've glossed over but there doesn't have to be a central server in this scenario and everything can be encrypted end-to-end. That's why this is really a distributed systems problem. In order for an app-developer to build such an app, the deeper problems around deployment, sync, and identity/connectivity need to be resolved. Developers just need something to target that provides the appropriate components. That's what the toolstack I previously linked is trying to solve. Without that, we're stuck with requiring someone else to provide the central system/aggregator. Clearly this is a non-trivial problem but if it can be cracked then it'll be as impactful as the opening up of the Web was.
  - bsbechtel 12y ago
    >>Isn't that just a technical challenge? I supposed it could be, or a UI problem....it all depends on the architecture of the code and how you choose to define the problem. Regardless, it's all certainly feasible and possibly will be done sooner or later, it's just a matter of when. Are you familiar with the Diaspora project from a few years back? https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/
  - digisth 12y ago
    I wonder how this type of system would get paid for. If we're all paying for our private clouds and we use this 'Distribugram', who pays for server to server transfers? Is it free to the users (handled by provider peering/transit agreements)? Do users pay? Puller or pusher? How does this impact people with many followers/followees? Do they pay more? Thinking about this, I wonder if the economics would work given the ad-supporter/loss-leading aspects of some of these services. Still, interesting.

by amirmc 12y ago

bsbechtel 12y ago

All good points. I think it's certainly feasible in the future, but not today. There are challenges besides technical and business that need to be solved too. For instance, you have a personal cloud server you set up that runs all your apps, and you have an Instagram-like app for your photos. How do others get to view your photos? There needs to be an aggregator that runs across servers to pull all the content and puts it into a newsfeed, with an easy to access URL/app for your friends to open and view your photos. How do we get this? With a centralized server?

amirmc 12y ago
Isn't that just a technical challenge? In this world view, you are your own central server and everyone else is their own. Let's take your example and run with it (bear in mind I'm ignoring some rough edges here). You share your instagram-style pics into an app on your personal server to begin with and then from there they get federated out to people who've decided to 'follow' you (or those you have allowed to). Practically speaking, the pic (or rather access to it) is given to the app on the personal servers of those followers. Their server then constructs a newsfeed of all the incoming pics and presents it to their user (via an app or web-interface or whatever). This doesn't happen on the mobile device itself but on the 'personal cloud' of the user. There are many things I've glossed over but there doesn't have to be a central server in this scenario and everything can be encrypted end-to-end. That's why this is really a distributed systems problem. In order for an app-developer to build such an app, the deeper problems around deployment, sync, and identity/connectivity need to be resolved. Developers just need something to target that provides the appropriate components. That's what the toolstack I previously linked is trying to solve. Without that, we're stuck with requiring someone else to provide the central system/aggregator. Clearly this is a non-trivial problem but if it can be cracked then it'll be as impactful as the opening up of the Web was.
- bsbechtel 12y ago
  >>Isn't that just a technical challenge? I supposed it could be, or a UI problem....it all depends on the architecture of the code and how you choose to define the problem. Regardless, it's all certainly feasible and possibly will be done sooner or later, it's just a matter of when. Are you familiar with the Diaspora project from a few years back? https://diasporafoundation.org/ https://diasporafoundation.org/
- digisth 12y ago
  I wonder how this type of system would get paid for. If we're all paying for our private clouds and we use this 'Distribugram', who pays for server to server transfers? Is it free to the users (handled by provider peering/transit agreements)? Do users pay? Puller or pusher? How does this impact people with many followers/followees? Do they pay more? Thinking about this, I wonder if the economics would work given the ad-supporter/loss-leading aspects of some of these services. Still, interesting.